5 Ways To Grab Your Reader At The Start Of A Novel
The opening to your novel is gold dust — don’t squander it
If you’re not a famous best-selling author with a huge following, you have no guarantee of readers flocking to grab your book, so when someone gets as far as reading your opening sentence, you should do everything in your power to keep hold of them and draw them into the book. But how?
As an aside, if you are a best-selling author with a huge following, please leave details of your winning formula in the comments so we can all emulate you. If not — read on!
It’s a delicate balance for an unknown writer or struggling mid-lister to snare a random reader, but there are practical steps you can take to draw your reader in.
Catching the readers’ attention
Family and friends aside, don’t expect the reader to start out interested in your book. It’s your job to catch their attention.
A reader with nothing invested in a book beyond a mild curiosity or a spare few minutes to browse will not wade through detail about people, places, or events they know nothing about. The start is not the place for scene-setting. It’s a good idea to assume that the reader who is dipping into your book really couldn’t care less about you, your characters, or their story, no matter how fascinating it all is to you. And of course, it should be fascinating to you because otherwise why would you write it?
Your target here is the reader who made it to your first sentence — something attracted them to your book, the cover, the blurb, who knows? It means there’s a good chance they like your genre, and you could draw them in if you lay the right bait. Just remember — as they start to read, they couldn’t care less about your story or your fictional world.
Imagine you’re waiting for a train. A guy approaches and says, “If you spare just a few moments, I’ll tell you my life story, it’s really interesting.” Rather than stopping to listen, you’ll be hurrying away on the strength of a fictitious appointment. Now imagine, in this same situation, you hear a sudden shout and a squeal of brakes. You spin round, attention caught, to see what’s happening. And that’s how your novel needs to start, not with a plea to stick with it, it’ll get interesting later on, but with a sharp squeal of brakes.
Here are 5 ways of making a random reader turn to look:
1. Raise a question that piques your reader’s curiosity
This needs to be a question that promises a quick answer. This is not the place to raise a big question that will not be answered until the end of the book. The aim is to make the reader curious enough that they read the rest of the paragraph.
It was a Thursday in December, the night that Debbie saw the killer.
This is the opening from Danuta Reah’s Only Darkness. On the face of it, it’s a big question — who is the killer, who has been killed? But think about your reaction as a reader — you don’t know or care anything about Debbie, but there is an underlying promise that we’re about to see the circumstances of this intriguing encounter. It’s worth reading on to see how it happens.
The words changed on the long drive north, Annie’s determination did not.
This is the opening from The Doll Makers. This raises far less dramatic questions — what words, why did they change? There’s enough here to warrant reading on a sentence or so, which will unearth the information that Annie’s on her way to see her father, and it’s going to be a difficult meeting. All the time, she’s getting closer and it might be worth sticking around just to see this drama play out.
Not that we — as the reader — really care about Annie’s news as it affects her life, or about Debbie as she hurries home through the rain. We read on for the dramatic encounter that we know is about to happen, to see how it will play out.
2. Startle the reader with something unexpected
Just like the sudden squeal of brakes, the unexpected grabs our attention. It might not be for long, but it can be enough to spread the bait to tempt the random reader to keep going.
Laura slumped into bed, wrapping herself in the warmth of the quilt, closing her eyes to let sleep overtake her. The low creaking sound barely had time to register before it became a roar, a blaze of light, and a wave of icy cold water slammed into her.*
This tells us Laura was relaxed and ready for bed, dropping off to sleep. And suddenly she’s drenched in icy cold water. Why? Where from? Has someone thrown a bucket of water over her? Is she in a sinking boat? Is it a flash flood? What creaked? Where did the blaze of light come from?
This is the squeal of brakes that we hope will make the random reader turn to look, and maybe read just a little further to see whether Laura is facing a prankster with a bucket or fighting for her life.
3. Put a character in danger but don’t let them know it
Films often use this opening. They show someone in a hurry, in a rush, trying to get things done — and failing to notice that something isn’t right, that an air of menace is creeping closer. The viewers can see it in the camera angles, in the tone of the background music. They get ever closer to the edges of their seats as they watch some undefined threat creep nearer and nearer.
It makes compelling viewing and can make gripping reading. But how do you convey a chilling sense of menace behind an otherwise normal scene? One technique is to use more detail than the scene warrants, to make the reader follow your character's moves and actions so closely that it becomes clear something nasty is building up out of sight. This is how the opening to Only Darkness unfolds. At the end of her day’s work, Debbie goes through her home-time routine before hurrying for her train. As readers, we are aware of the impending encounter that she knows nothing about.
The use of detail to create a sense of menace can be a delicate balance. It shouldn’t morph into a giant heap of dry information. And if you smother a reader in detail, make sure there is a payback; never let it fizzle out to nothing because you’ll leave the reader feeling cheated, and disinclined to read further.
Make use of the techniques that mimic things like the dramatic camera angles and scary background music beloved by filmmakers. For more on how to use camera techniques in prose, check out this article.
4. Make things just slightly out of the ordinary
The idea here is to pique the reader’s curiosity as to why something is different. It can be something small and subtle. Indeed it can be more effective when it’s small because it holds the promise of an early answer. The random reader reads on to find out why.
As the elevator jerked to a halt at street level, Molly was swept through the open doors in the rush to head for home. Then she paused, her eyes on the departing crowd. As the doors began to slide shut, she slipped back between them, and pressed the button for the top floor.*
There is clearly a break in routine here. Molly — whoever she is — has been part of a crowd heading for home, presumably leaving work, but she pauses, makes sure she’s not seen, then goes back into the elevator and heads for the top floor. Was that where she came from? Why the subterfuge? Is she meeting someone? Is she on some mission of revenge? In the mind of the reader, it raises the useful question Why?
One sultry evening in July a young man emerged from the small furnished room he occupied in a large five-storied house in Sennoy Lane and turned slowly, with an air of indecision towards the Kalininsky Bridge.
This is the opening sentence from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. If the young man had simply turned towards the Kalininsky Bridge, it would have been no more than a man leaving a house and heading towards a bridge, but he turns “slowly, with an air of indecision”. That makes it out of the ordinary, a breach in routine, and something to be curious about.
5. Surprise!
Readers come to books with preconceptions about the world around them. You can use these in all sorts of ways, including, as in point 3 above, in the use of camera techniques. Another way to grab attention is to surprise the reader by going against their preconceptions. For example, take a stereotypical person — say an elderly cleric — and have them do something outside their stereotype; roll a joint, do a handstand.
The reader’s preconception will generate a particular expectation. If you go against that, you create surprise, you grab their attention, you start them asking Why?
Janet hated making Martha’s bed. She could never get the wheels on the quilt.*
Wait! What? With luck, the oddity of the statement grabs the reader and compels them to read on to make sense of this bizarre state of affairs.
Be dramatic!
This is a bonus number 6 because I can do surprises too!
Set up the whole premise of your novel in a sentence or two — layout the drama that awaits the reader who reads on. But be careful with this one. There can be a fine line between the guy on the station who wanted to tell you his life story, and the squeal of brakes that got your attention and made you want to know what was going on.
The man sitting opposite, coolly watching me through a haze of cigarette smoke, controlled the financial future of a continent. More importantly, he controlled mine.
That’s the opening to Michael Ridpath’s The Marketmaker. It’s a big dramatic statement spanning the whole premise of the book, but at the same time, it promises an interesting personal interaction that is just about to happen.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
That is the first sentence — yes, it’s all one sentence — of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It’s long, it’s convoluted, it doesn’t promise any quick answers to the questions it raises. In fact, it has the guy with his life story closer to hand than the squeal of brakes. And yet, The War of the Worlds hasn’t been out of print since first being published in 1898.
The above techniques can all work, but The War of the Worlds is a useful counter-example to stop us from becoming hidebound by rules.
What next?
In using these techniques you are not trying to get a commitment from the reader to read the entire book. You are just hooking them in to read one more sentence … then another … then a paragraph … then a page…
But you can’t draw someone through a whole book this way. Having caught their attention, the next step is to spring the trap and get them to commit to the story. This commitment is the next stage. It’s a different technique, a separate step, and another story for another time.
*These are quotes that I pulled out of my vast store of unused openings. I used them to illustrate the points, but they’re not from published books, which is why no source is cited. If any of them sparks the idea for a story in you, please feel free to use it.
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